Episode 258: Friend of the World

Title card – the more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and likewise pain – rolls eyes at Dante quote

HI def black and white we open with a radio, piano music and spoken word recording about the end of the earth, we see a knife and a bottle of booze is on the table.

Then we cut cut grainy colour home movie of a woman walking and smiling at the camera to awful fiddle Ode to Joy...

This 50 minute movie is listed as the 31st best zombie movie of all time by Rotten Tomatoes as scored by the critics and as one of the 10 and MovieWeb included it in the list of Top 10 Zombie movies you haven't seen. Both of those things couldn't be more wrong and misguided. 

You see one zombies, and it isn't even a decent zombie for one scene. And it is a short scene.

This pretentious Eraserhead meets Dr Strangelove and Waiting for Godot wannabe wankfest reminds me of the novel by the "European sissy writer" in David Mamet's Speed the Plow,  The Bridge; or, Radiation and the Half-Life of Society. A Study of Decay.  That was a joke with Mamet thinking of the most ludicrous pseudo-intellectual content.

Whilst it was interesting, and I mean that in the same way you'd look at a weird shaped turd, or a dog that hiccups with a Mexican accent, it was NOT a zombie movie, good or otherwise. It was a disappointing pretentious art house movie that would have been better put on as an off-off-off Broadway play. If you think listening to Ode to Joy played on a screechy fiddle, documentaries on planarians whilst the shouty male lead says things like "There is no good antonym for instinct." is entertainment then this is for you.

It wasn't for me.

4/10    

FIN